There were six of these worms. They gyrated in peculiar patterns, at one time joining their bodies to form a gigantic hoop around the ship. Different radiation patterns were made evident upon the ship's dials, and it was obvious that these vermiform beings were trying to communicate. Neither Hoag nor his two interpreters could make anything of the radiation patterns, and one of the interpreters, after trying hard, sat blindly in a corner and shivered. Inferiority complex. Or that for a beginning while alien minds strove impatiently to penetrate the naked and shivering Earth minds. This was space, and worse it was space in the old times before warp-vibrant communication, before rattled Earthmen could scream to a home base for moral support. The crew was still out there at the tubes when those worms came along, and before they could crawl or jet their way to the airlock, one of the worms plucked up a crew member. It was Able-bodied Spaceman Kroner, as capable and steady and fearless a man who ever had boarded the _Lone Star_. Kroner was seen at first to go rigid while the worm held him with two tentacles and looked him over with that submerged, swimming eye. Suddenly Kroner blasted his oxygen-alcohol shoulder jets. The worm let him go and recoiled. [Illustration: _Suddenly Kroner blasted his shoulder jets._] * * * * * Kroner slammed away into space, into nothingness. Suddenly, almost at the half-limit of his short supply of fuel, he turned on his own axis. He was expert, this Kroner, and had flipped his jet control so perfectly that he had turned a hundred and eighty degrees and for a couple of seconds he kept going directly backward on momentum against the jets' renewed forward blast. While that happened he jerked his arms and legs in a wild, running motion, running as though forward while still going backward. It was a comic thing to see. But at the instant of equilibrium between forward motion and backward motion, those in the _Lone Star's_ control compartment caught Kroner's face at a high magnification upon the screen. "He'd been frightened mad," Hoag said. "We didn't need any doctor to tell us. We saw his face. And what he was shrieking all that time was, 'Ma--Ma--Ma--Ma--'" He came at _Lone Star_ like a meteor, his arms outstretched as though running to the safety of maternal arms, and he hit the space ship so hard that he started a seam in her outer skin. Whether he was killed by the impact or by the rupture of his suit was a rhetorical question. The man's body exploded outward in frozen streamers through the rents in the suit. The space worm plucked him up, examined him, casually tore the broken suit and the corpse into pieces.... And, in the control compartment, the Second Officer began to scream and to hide, forcing his way into an impossible recess behind a switchboard.